History, Syndromes And A Lesson For Today

September 29, 1993|By Frances Diem Vardamis, a writer who lived in the Balkans for four years.

A petty dictator, permitted to nibble at his neighbors' territory, sooner or later will pose a major threat to American security. Stop Hitler before he marches into the Sudetenland and avoid World War II. That is the Munich Syndrome. For two decades, Munich determined U.S. foreign policy. Munich led the United States into the quagmire of Vietnam.

Avoid taking sides in distant conflicts over issues that are imperfectly understood and that do not affect the vital interests of the United States. That is the Vietnam Syndrome. For another 20 years it held America in the slough of hesitation.

The memory of Munich pushed America into Iraq despite warnings from believers in the Vietnam Syndrome. There were limitations, critics said, to the power of America to remake the world.

Then American-armed might pounded the cities of the Euphrates plain until Iraqi resistance crumbled. Kuwait's liberation buried the Vietnam Syndrome.

The TV cameras of CNN, focusing on the missile-filled night skies over Baghdad, demonstrated the overwhelming superiority of American weaponry. Given the will to use the full panoply of its invincible technology, the United States could halt aggression, destroy the armies of its adversaries, succor the oppressed, and lead irascible mankind into universal peace and harmony. That was the lesson of Iraq. That defined the Iraq Syndrome.

The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary defines a syndrome as "a group of symptoms that characterize a disease." When a nation's policy is defined by a disease, the body politic is probably ill.

Perhaps the only lesson to be learned from Munich is that if the aggressive policies of one dictator, Adolph Hitler, had been opposed in the beginning, World War II might have been avoided. Similarly, without American intervention, the peoples of one particular nation, Vietnam, might have peacefully reconciled their differences and there would have been no names on a Memorial Wall in Washington. The war in Iraq proved only that U.S. firepower was capable, in 1991, of forcing the Iraqi army to retreat behind its own borders.

Victory in Iraq does not guarantee that U.S. firepower can ensure peace and prosperity in Somalia. Similarly, Margaret Thatcher's invocation of the ghost of Munich as justification for bombing the Serbs is like vaccinating a sick person with cow pox to cure the flu. How would attacking the Serbs lift the Croatian siege of Muslim Mostar? How can providing "unarmed" Muslims with heavy weapons reduce the violence in Bosnia? Is Serbia or Croatia ever likely to imitate Nazi Germany and invade Poland or bomb England? Syndromes, and other illnesses, are not interchangeable.

Taking sides in the Balkans leads to disaster. That was the Sarajevo Syndrome, born on the June afternoon in 1914 when Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on a street corner in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb dreaming of freedom from Austrian oppression. Russia favored the cause of Serbian self-determination. So did France, England and, eventually, the United States.

After five bitter years of trench warfare, the world thought it had learned the lesson of Sarajevo. At all costs avoid involvement in the Balkans, and, by extension, in the rest of Central Europe. The Sarajevo Syndrome led to Munich. And the Munich Syndrome to Vietnam. And Munich and Iraq, in turn, might lead right back to the city of Sarajevo.

A false, and frightening, symmetry threatens the conclusion of the 20th Century. The world again is in danger of trying last season's medication on this year's virus. President Clinton, in suggesting a new approach to peacekeeping at the United Nations on Monday, demonstrated an awareness of the pitfalls in oversimplifying the past. The most valuable lesson history can teach is that treating a new illness with the prescription for an outmoded syndrome can be lethal. The Bosnia situation calls for fresh, innovative initiatives, not old cliches.